POSITION (AGAINST): AIRBNB IS A CULTURE KILLER
by Naima Karp
I’ve lived in NYC my entire life and I can’t really imagine living anywhere else. But in the past couple of years, with the notoriously volatile rent flux of New York, I’ve been forced to contemplate moving. My parents have been here since the 1970’s and have watched a mix of beautiful and tragic occur with the rise of gentrification, especially in their neighborhood of the East Village. They live on the corner of 14th and C, which has undergone decades of renovation. They’ve lived in a rent stabilized building their whole lives, and the buildings have slowly been taken over by NYU and New School students as tenants. My mother and father’s entire block on 14th street, from Avenue C to 1st Avenue, has dwindled from residential brownstones, to blocks of Dunkin’ Donuts and luxury college housing under scaffolding.
Sites like AirBnB.com are leading to rent-stabilized apartments skyrocketing in price, when New Yorkers are already struggling to keep a roof over their heads. Affordable housing has become extinct. It’s ruining the culture of New York (not that the culture hasn’t been ruined already). Soon, we’ll be kicked out of our homes and be competing with tourists who have turned the entire city into a series of mini hotels. According to Bloomberg, 72% of the site’s NYC listings are illegal. Landlords are evicting residents from affordable units that they’ve occupied for years, and instead turning the residential building into a makeshift hotel, with no regulations or acknowledgment of New York’s rental laws.
The college students who live in my parents’ building are subletting their apartments for a ridiculous amount above market price, and with our building management unsure whether they want to raise the rent or sell the building, my parents are worried they might have to leave New York for the first time in over 40 years. With the troubled economy and not-so-slow gentrification of the East Village, the affordable housing act is fighting to keep New Yorkers in their homes, and websites like AirBnB are threatening this and instead providing more for tourists and entitled residents who have recently moved here.
Dominican and Puerto Rican families that I’ve grown up with are slowly disappearing, being forced to move back to another country with family, or uproot their lives in some other equally disorienting sense. The sense of community is practically extinct in New York, vanishing in the past ten years, and sites like Air BnB contribute immensely to this. All these families still being here is the reason that New York has managed to hang onto a thread of cultural authenticity, and in turn, this authenticity is why the city is still special and a tourist attraction. However, by kicking these long-time residents out, the authenticity is vanishing, and I’m grappling to find what culture my city still has, besides an upper-middle class college one. AirBnB is turning the city into a mini-hotel empire, and with enough expensive college housing bulldozing through neighborhoods, it’s practically there already; this site is just giving it an unneeded nudge in the wrong direction.
Sure, it’s an affordable option for travelers all over, but not so affordable for those who have been paying their dues here for years, for locals all over. It’s creating an underground market that is forcing out inhabitants who have been there for decades, especially in markets like Bedford-Stuyvesent and Harlem. The company essentially is advocating the elimination of rent-regulated apartments, and speed up New York’s loss of culture even faster. I understand the consumer appeal: it’s a bohemian, less commercialized version of staying in a Holiday Inn. But by staying there, you’re essentially turning this whole city into a commercialized Holiday Inn. Already, we’re not far off. Save your bohemian inclination for the vintage stores and French cafes, to help keep my parents home, and restore our city’s long lost tranquility.
POSITION (FOR): AIRBNB IS AN EXAMPLE OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM AT WORK
by Tom Proctor
Listing your property on Airbnb is on the rise. And of course, New Yorkers don’t overwhelmingly like Airbnb. This comes as no shock as New York City residents are notoriously prickly and incredibly territorial; the idea that Europeans can waltz into their apartment buildings 4 days at a time naturally rubs people the wrong way.
This is not to say that these New Yorkers don’t have a point. In a recent ruling made by the Manhattan Housing Court, a judge stated that rent-stabilized tenants were not allowed to list their properties on the user-championed property site. This ruling was made out of a matter of fairness: if your rent is stabilized, then you should not be able to take advantage of this by renting out your property at market value. You’ve already won the housing lottery by nabbing a rent-stabilized apartment, so don’t be fucking greedy.
The ruling is logical and justifiable, but I just fear it will open the floodgates for stronger rulings against the property rental website. In a statement following the case, State Senator Liz Kruger stated:
“This decision reinforces what tenant advocates and I have been saying all along — almost all NYC residents who list their homes on sites like Airbnb are violating the terms of their leases and putting themselves at risk of eviction.”
This would indicate that Ms. Kruger believes it should be illegal to ever sublet your rented apartment. In NYC this would criminalize just about everyone using the service.
As Airbnb chips away at the hotel industry market place they will continue to be attacked by corporate interests. If we allow that to happen, innovative, peer-to-peer based market places will be shut down; taking power and influence away from the common individual and placed, once again, in the hands of the 1%.
Not only does Airbnb allow people to travel around the world and stay in fantastic places for the fraction of the cost of a hotel, it also provides a little extra income for those opening up their place to the public. In New York – one of the most expensive places in the world to live and work – this extra income can make a real difference to every day people.
Airbnb is likely to have positive knock-on effects for everyone, not just those that use their website. By eating into the hotel market, hotel industries will be forced to reduce costs or improve service in order to compete. At it’s most fundamental level this is what America is about: unbridled free market capitalism.
It is anti-American and anti-capitalist to attack Airbnb for providing a service that is cheaper, more efficiently run and provides real competition in a stagnant market place.
So New Yorkers don’t like Airbnb. So fucking what? In order to protect one of the most fundamental American values and attract new, innovative, business concepts to the market place, allowing residents to sublet their apartments to tourists is a small price to pay.
What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments area below